Video clips for indirect outreach

Building a ‘bridge strategy’ site using YouTube videos

Bridge strategy sites
are built around a secular topic of interest, and should offer genuinely useful material about their chosen subject. However, they also transition appropriately to material that shares the Gospel. This can be through testimony, or pages that draw a spiritual parallel from the chosen subject, or merely links to other outreach sites.
They absolutely should not use a decoy ‘bait and switch’ technique.

Because users cannot easily assess the value of a video clip without actually watching it, this gives a special significance to building a ‘bridge strategy’ video-clip site around almost any secular topic. (This was how Yahoo started – some students producing a list of recomended websites to share with friends.)

YouTube offers a very simple way to insert any video clip into your own website, using a line of copy/paste code. This makes it very easy to build an attractive compendium of video clips. It will of course be time-consuming for you to do the spade-work, find the clips available on your topic, and then assess those worthy of inclusion. (You can also subscribe and be notified of new additions to YouTube within subject tags you specify.)

This collection of clips within your chosen subject area will be valuable to others having the same interest, because you are presenting a collection of material which they would otherwise have to search for, and may not even realise exists.

Your site can then use a sensitive bridging technique to offer links to appropriate material linking to the gospel: testimony, stories, spiritual parallel, or just offsite links to other appropriate outreach sites such as PowertoChange.com or MenTodayOnLine.com.

BoDocus is a secular example of such a collection of
clips within a subject area.